Access changed my trajectory.
I grew up in Zone 3, Southeast Atlanta — a place where the nearest grocery store is a drive, not a walk, and where a gas station is often the closest thing to a market. I know what it means to live in a food desert, because I lived in one.
What changed my path was access. An early college program let me start classes at Georgia State by 11th grade — a chance most students in my zone never got. That access built the confidence to believe I could perform anywhere. It's the same belief that carried me across the country for college, and eventually across the world to study in China: the first time anyone in my family had lived outside the country, and the experience that taught me how much bigger the world is than the block I grew up on.
Agriculture runs through this story too. I'm from the South, where working the land has always been tied to survival and to ownership. And when I think about health, I think about the realities Black women and infants face — mortality rates that are higher than they should ever be — and how access to quality care, early and often, changes outcomes.
Fort Kendrick Foundation is how I turn what access did for me into something that reaches further than my own story.